REMINDER: Register for the ANS Annual Meeting 2025 (via Zoom, February 22, 2025)

Registration is open for ANS 2025, which will be held on February 22, 2025. You can register online via Eventbrite by clicking here or the following link:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/american-name-society-annual-meeting-2025-tickets-1071828831889

You can also download this form and mail in a check.

The American Name Society Annual Meeting for 2025 will be held online using the Zoom platform. It is accessible via Mac or PC. The meeting will require a passcode, which will be sent via email to all registrants and presenters by February 21st.

We set up a schedule that will work globally, and this means that some presenters are scheduled at times outside of normal working hours.

The annual meeting schedule is available here.

ANS Annual Meeting 2025 Schedule

We have been working hard to set up a schedule that will work globally, and this means that some presenters will be scheduled at times outside of normal working hours. The schedule below is subject to change depending on speaker availability.

Keep apprised of any changes to the annual meeting schedule here on our website.

Saturday, February 22, 2025

ALL TIMES ARE UTC -8:00, PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

Conference Opening Address

5:15 AM Brandon Simonson (Boston University, MA, USA), Welcome and Opening Remarks

First Session

5:30 AM Nihan Ketrez (Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey), Anthropomorphism in puppy and kitten names in Holly Webb’s children’s books and their translations

~~6:00 AM Anna Tsepkova (Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Russia): A Cross-cultural Analysis of Terms Applied to Unconventional Anthroponyms in American and Russian Onomastic Practices~~ [Withdrawn]

6:30 AM Veronika Robustova (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia): Proper Names As Means of Cultural and Historic Information Transfer

Second Session

7:00 AM Ayokunmi Ojebode (University of Nottingham, UK), Abimbola Alao (Independent Scholar, UK), and Victoria Tischler (University of Surrey, UK): Cross-cultural Names and Identities as Dementia Behaviours in Abimbola Alao’s ‘My Name is Beatrice’ and Trevor Smith’s ‘An Evening with Dementia’

7:30 AM Maria Kopf (Universität Hamburg, Germany): Name Changes and Name Co-existence in Deaf Signing Communities in Germany

8:00 AM Thomas Ditye (Sigmund Freud University, Austria): The fear of saying personal names

8:30 AM I.M. Nick (Germanic Society for Forensic Linguistics, Germany): Names: A Journal of Onomastics Editor’s Report

9:00 AM Break

9:30 AM ANS Committees Meeting

Third Session

10:00 AM Lennart Chevallier (Kiel University, Germany) and Sören Wichmann (Kiel University, Germany): Mapping place names

10:30 AM Jarmo Jantunen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland), Tehri Ainiala University of Helsinki, Finland), Salla Jokela (Tampere University, Finland), and Jenny Tarvainen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland): Mapping Digital Discourses of the Capital Region of Finland: Combining Onomastics, CADS, and GIS

11:00 AM Russell Fielding (Coastal Carolina University, SC, USA): “A Change of Name during Sickness”: Surveying the Widespread Practice of Renaming in Response to Physical Illness

Fourth Session

11:30 AM Anuoluwapọ Adéwùnmí ADÉTỌ̀MÍWÁ (University of Lagos, Nigeria): Anthroponymy and cultural identity: the significance of akan and yorùbá personal names

12:00 PM Hanna Virranpää (University of Helsinki, Finland): Place names used by the first-generation Finnish Americans: examining migration letters

12:30 PM Mary Ann Walter (University of the Virgin Islands, USA): Femininity and Phonetics in Drag Names

1:00 PM Michael Akinpelu (University of Regina, SK, Canada), Dr. Hasiyatu Abubakari (University of Ghana Accra, Ghana), and Dr. Michel Nguessan (Governors State University, IL, USA): A Comparative Study of Divine Names Across African Languages and Cultures

1:30 PM ANS Annual Business Meeting

Fifth Session

2:30 PM Kenneth Price (Texas A&M University, TX, USA): Promoting Onomastics in Travel Writing: Multimodal Travel Toponymies

3:00 PM U-ri Go (Kangwon National University, Korea) and Jong-mi Kim (Kangwon National University, Korea): From Masculine to Feminine Naming Evolution: A Comparative Phonological Analysis of 18 Regions across Four Continents (1880-2023)

3:30 PM Cari Didion (Governors State University, IL, USA): Names and Brand Identity of Ethnic Businesses in Greater Chicago

Sixth Session

4:00 PM David Wade (Wade Research Foundation, USA): Name Peptides @ The University

4:30 PM Alexander Kilpatrick (Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, Japan): Machine Learning vs. Linear Regression: A Case Study on Gender Sound Symbolism in Japanese Given Names

5:00 PM Jinawat Kaenmuang (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand): Flavorful labels and elegant expressions: The role of culinary elements and rhetorical devices in Thai food shops’ nomenclature

5:30 PM Sarah Bunin Benor (Hebrew Union College, CA, USA): Shaina, Bamba, and Ruth Betta Finsberg: Trends in American Jews’ Naming of Pets

Closing

REMINDER: Register for the ANS Annual Meeting 2025 (via Zoom, February 22, 2025)

Registration is open for ANS 2025, which will be held on February 22, 2025. You can register online via Eventbrite by clicking here or the following link:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/american-name-society-annual-meeting-2025-tickets-1071828831889

You can also download this form and mail in a check.

We are working hard to set up a schedule that will work globally, and this means that some presenters will be scheduled at times outside of normal working hours.

The Book of Abstracts will be available before the conference.

Keep apprised of any changes to the annual meeting schedule here.

‘Proud Boys’ Name Handed Over to D.C. Church

A D.C. church has been handed the naming rights to the far-right Proud Boys group as retribution for the latter’s vandalism, per the Washington Post.

“A historic Black church in D.C. that was vandalized by members of the extremist Proud Boys in 2020 has secured the group’s naming rights, allowing the institution to seek proceeds from sales of the organization’s merchandise and membership dues.”

“[D.C. Superior Court Judge] Bosier effectively granted the church control over the name and symbols of the far-right group. A downtown landmark steeped in civil rights work, the church never received a multimillion-dollar judgment that the Proud Boys and its leader were ordered to pay in a civil case. The case stemmed from the night that Proud Boys tore down and destroyed the church’s Black Lives Matter sign.”

REMINDER: Register for the ANS Annual Meeting 2025 (via Zoom, February 22, 2025)

Registration is open for ANS 2025, which will be held on February 22, 2025. You can register online via Eventbrite by clicking here or the following link:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/american-name-society-annual-meeting-2025-tickets-1071828831889

You can also download this form and mail in a check.

We are working hard to set up a schedule that will work globally, and this means that some presenters will be scheduled at times outside of normal working hours.

The Book of Abstracts will be available before the conference.

Keep apprised of any changes to the annual meeting schedule here.

REMINDER: Register for the ANS Annual Meeting 2025 (via Zoom, February 22, 2025)

Registration is open for ANS 2025, which will be held on February 22, 2025. You can register online via Eventbrite by clicking here or the following link:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/american-name-society-annual-meeting-2025-tickets-1071828831889

You can also download this form and mail in a check.

We are working hard to set up a schedule that will work globally, and this means that some presenters will be scheduled at times outside of normal working hours.

The Book of Abstracts will be available before the conference.

Keep apprised of any changes to the annual meeting schedule here.

“Ozempic” is the ANS Name of the Year for 2024

filed under Featured, Name News, Name of the Year

“Ozempic” was chosen as the winner of the Name of the Year for 2024 by the American Name Society at its annual Name of the Year discussion and vote on January 9, 2025. This pharmaceutical brand name was selected for its significant linguistic features and spin-offs like “Ozempic face”, “Ozempic Olympics”, “oat-zempic”, “faux-zempic”.… Read More

Call For Papers: ANS panel at the MLA

The ANS panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention #mla26
8-11 January 2026, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

ONOMASTIC RHETORIC: ACTS OF NAMING IN REAL AND/OR IMAGINED WORLDS

Acts of naming people, places, and things are acts of power, whether for good or ill and whether in the real world or in imagined worlds. Sometimes names change, through other acts of power. Does it necessarily follow that accepting a given name is an act of weakness? What acts of naming occur in the liminal space between the real and the imagined? In this panel, we will consider acts of naming people (anthroponyms), characters (charactonyms), places (toponyms), theonyms (divine beings), events, and more in the real world and/or in imagined worlds from any era, from any place, as recorded or found in any media. Useful resources include, the archives of NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics (https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/issue/archive), the
ANS list of terminology (https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/keywords), Dorothy Dodge Robbins’ edited collection Literary Onomastics (2023), Star Medzerian Vanguri’s edited collection Rhetorics of Names and Naming (2016), and the Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming (2018).

Proposal Submission Process:
1. Email Dr. Anne W. Anderson (awanderson.editing@gmail.com) as follows:
a. Subject Line: Use “MLA 2026 proposal” in the subject line.
b. Email body: In the email body include the title and first line of the abstract, the
full name(s) of the author(s), their affiliation(s), and their email address(es).
c. Proposal: Attach a PDF file that includes the proposal title, an abstract of up to
350 words, and a list of works cited. Do NOT include author identification in the
PDF.

2. DEADLINE: Proposals must be received by 11:59 pm EST on Monday, 17 March 2025.
Authors will be notified about the results of the blind review on or by 27 March 2025.
3. Contributors selected for the thematic panel must be members of both MLA and ANS in order to present their papers; MLA membership must be obtained by 7 April 2024.
4. Questions? Please contact Dr. Anne W. Anderson (awanderson.editing@gmail.com).

REMINDER: ANS Name of the Year Discussion and Vote (Virtual, 9 January 2025) – TOMORROW

ANS Name of the Year Discussion and Vote

Thursday, January 9, 2025 on Zoom, 12 – 2pm PST

REGISTRATION is now open! Click here to register for the discussion and vote.

Join us for our annual Name of the Year discussion! We will be nominating, discussing, and voting on eligible names in the following categories:

Personal Names: Names of groups or individuals, including nicknames, given names, surnames, or a combination of these.
Place Names: Names or nicknames of any real geographical locations (e.g., rivers, lakes, mountains, streets, buildings, regions, countries, etc.).
Brand Names: Names of commercial products, companies, organizations, and businesses (both for-profit and non-profit). This category includes personal names used as brands for commerce.
Artistic/Literary Names: Names of fictional persons, places, or institutions, in any written, oral, or visual medium (e.g., titles of art or musical works, books, plays, tv programs, movies, games, etc.).
E-Names: Names of online platforms, websites, and movements, as well as hashtags, usernames, etc.
Miscellaneous Names: Names that do not fit in any of the above five categories.

The discussion will be conducted by Laurel Sutton, ANS President and Name of the Year Coordinator.

If you have not done so already, you can nominate names via this form

Advance nominations must be received no later than December 31st, 2024, at midnight Pacific.

Tickets to this event are free!

The URL to our Zoom room will be sent to everyone who registers for this event.

Please review previous Name of the Year reports, to better understand the type of names that will be accepted:

Name of the Year Report 2023 (PDF)

Name of the Year Report 2022 (PDF)

Name of the Year Report 2021 (PDF)

About Names: Dr. Cleveland Evans on the name “Jude”

Jude Law at Comicon 2018 (Photo by Gage Skidmore, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his December 29th column, he discusses the name “Jude”.

Happy Birthday to W. P. Inman, Albus Dumbledore and Pius XIII!

British actor Jude Law turns 52 today. Oscar-nominated for playing Confederate veteran W. P. Inman in “Cold Mountain” (2003), he was wizard Dumbledore in “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” (2018) and “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” (2022). He played Pius XIII in HBO’s “The Young Pope” (2016) and “The New Pope” (2020) and now stars as FBI agent Terry Husk in “The Order,” which opened Dec. 6.

Jude is from the Hebrew name Yehudah, which means praise. In Genesis, Leah, Jacob’s first wife, names her fourth son Judah while praising God. The tribe of Judah later gave its name to the southern Hebrew kingdom after it split from Israel.

In English Bibles, Judah is the Old Testament form. In the New Testament, Judas (the Greek form) names several men, including two apostles — Judas Iscariot, Jesus’s betrayer, and a Judas mentioned in the gospels of Luke and John. Traditionally, he’s considered the same as Matthew and Mark’s Thaddeus.

The New Testament’s next-to-last book is the Epistle of Jude. Jude was originally the French form of Judas. In most other languages, the epistle is called Judas. English translations probably used “Jude” to assure readers it wasn’t written by Iscariot.

Because of that, in English the “Thaddeus” apostle is usually called Saint Jude, even though he’s Judas in the Bible. Traditionally, St. Jude was martyred in Persia alongside fellow apostle Simon the Zealot.

Jude was rare as an English boy’s name. After the Reformation, Jude was used a bit more as parents searched the Bible for names. The 1851 British census found 92 Judes, while the 1850 U.S. census included 125. Jude was more common among Puritan descendants in the North. Only seven of 1850’s Judes were born in the South.

Catholics and Anglicans pray to St. Jude for “hopeless cases,” reasoning since Jude’s name is close to “Judas,” he is prayed to rarely and so is the “saint of last resort.”

Comedian Danny Thomas prayed to St. Jude when starting his career, promising to establish a hospital if he had success. When Thomas became a television star through “Make Room for Daddy” (then “The Danny Thomas Show” starting with the fourth season, 1953-1964), he immediately began raising money to build St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Today it’s one of the world’s most famous charities.

Although the hospital opened in 1962, Jude first became a top 1,000 baby name in the United States in 1954 just after Thomas began promoting his plan.

In 1969 Jude jumped 69% to rank 669th. The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” the No. 1 single of 1968, was responsible. Paul McCartney first titled the song “Hey Jules” after John Lennon’s son Julian.

Jude Law’s parents named him after both the song and Thomas Hardy’s famous novel “Jude the Obscure” (1895). Law’s career clearly revitalized Jude in the United States. Jude had fallen below the top 1,000 when Law’s first Oscar-nominated role as Dickie in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999) made him famous.

The name has boomed in recent years, peaking at 151st in 2021 when 2,504 were born. It receded to 161st in 2023, perhaps because of competition from Judah, which ranked 176th that year. Jude and Judah are both helped by sounding like hugely popular Lucas, Luca and Luke.

With Law nearing grandfather age, Jude may fall further. However, it’ll be decades before the name Jude is again obscure.

Want to learn more? Read on to learn more about the name “Jude”!